The Language Desert: The Condition of Literacy and Reading in Contemporary America

Humanities

Michael Tracey¹ 

[1] Department of Media Studies, College of Media, Communication and Information, University of Colorado at Boulder, Colorado, 1511 University Avenue, Boulder, CO 80309, USA; E-Mail

关键词: literacy;    reading;    cognitive;    democracy;    Founders;    culture;   

DOI  :  10.3390/h4010017

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

This essay is an engagement with a series of propositions about literacy and reading in the United States: that large numbers of people struggle with what one might call narrative complexity; that they resolve such struggles by falling back onto narrative simplicities which, through a series of cultural preferences, congeal to produce much of the stuff of popular culture; that this condition and process is essentially what the varied critics—from left and right—of the culture of modernity were actually identifying, though from a largely normative, not empirical, standpoint; that what was being critiqued was essentially a condition formed by cognitive underdevelopment; and that we can actually explain this empirically by mining decades’ worth of research in reading and literacy studies, particularly in the context of childhood and social class. In short, this paper is an admittedly tentative step in an effort to build a bridge between two knowledge silos that have in part remained determinably apart—reading/literacy studies and cultural/critical theory. The essay also suggests that, in order to understand reading and literacy, it is important to begin to engage research in neuroscience, particularly that which suggests that the brain is actually not designed—in evolutionary terms—to read.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2015 by the author; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.